US bishops slam mega-detention plan for immigrants

“The thought of holding thousands of families in massive warehouses should challenge the conscience of every American,” said Bishop Brendan Cahill of Victoria, Texas, chairman of the US bishops’ Committee on Migration. 

“Whatever their immigration status, these are human beings created in the image and likeness of God, and this is a moral inflection point for our country,” he said in a February 20 statement issued by the bishops conference.

According to the plan announced last week, the administration intends to spend an estimated US$38.3 billion from last year’s reconciliation bill to implement a new detention model by the end of fiscal year 2026.

This figure, Bishop Cahill noted, vastly outstrips other immigration-related expenditures, amounting to “nearly 50 times the annual budget for the entire immigration court system, and almost five times the funding provided this year to operate the federal prison system”.

Under the proposal, immigration authorities would open eight so-called “mega-centres”, each reportedly capable of detaining between 7000 and 10,000 people.

“Aside from the internment camps used to incarcerate Japanese Americans in the 1940s, such facilities have no precedent in American history,” the bishop’s statement said.

Bishop Cahill described these plans as deeply disturbing, and said they challenged the moral sensibilities of Americans.

“These plans are deeply troubling. The federal government does not have a positive track record when it comes to detaining large numbers of people, especially families, and the proposed scale of these facilities is difficult to comprehend,” Bishop Cahill said.

He added that the bishops conference had “unequivocally opposed the indiscriminate mass deportation of people and raised concerns about existing conditions in detention centres”.

The statement underscored a lack of access to pastoral care for detainees and reiterated the bishops’ long-held opposition to expanding family detention, citing its “harmful impacts on children in particular”.

Bishop Cahill asked the administration and the US Congress to reconsider the financial and moral costs of the proposed detention expansion, and to “pursue a more just approach to immigration enforcement that truly respects human dignity, the sanctity of families and religious liberty”.

FULL STORY

US bishops warn ICE mega-detention plan is ‘moral inflection point’ for America | National Catholic Reporter (By Camilo Barone)